An IT (Information Technology) provider can test a new application to provide a sandbox or test environment that can recreate a production-like environment which may include a virtual data center and advanced network. Typically, the environment is separate from a customer's production environment and requires a separate deployment when the workload is ready to be run in the production environment.
Approaches can be used to provision new applications in a production environment. One way is provide development, integration, staging, to production environment as a life cycle progression. The application can be implemented and created in a development environment by a team, handed off to an operations team for installation in a staging environment to validate that everything works in a customer like scenario. Finally, the application can be provisioned a final time in the destination production environment, which may be by another team. This approach can be time consuming since the application is reinstalled and handed off between different environments and personnel/teams. The approach can also be prone to error, since the same application tested and validated, is reinstalled on a different set of hardware by different people.
Another approach is known as development and operations (a.k.a., DevOps), which can include a development team able to handle making continuous incremental updates to the production environment directly. However, this approach does not use a staging environment for validation, which can expose changes made directly on the production infrastructure to application defects that may not have been screened by tests in the build process.